Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851–1911) was born and grew up on the Aegean island of Skiathos, where he also spent the last years of his life.
Though his thoughts were ever on Skiathos and its inhabitants, he lived most of his adult life in Athens and earned a basic living by translating foreign authors and writing his own stories for newspapers and periodicals. His simple, reclusive and pious life earned him the title of ‘kosmokalόyeros’ (lay monk). His translations include works by authors as diverse as Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, de Maupassant, Bram Stoker and Jerome K. Jerome. His own work comprises four early novels and almost two hundred short stories.
Alexandros Rizos Rangavis (1809–1892) was a Greek man of letters, poet and statesman. Born in Constantinople in 1809 to a Greek Phanariot family, he was raised in Bucharest and Odessa, and attended military school in Munich. Following his return to Greece, Rangavis served at the Ministry of Education, helped organize the founding of the first university of modern Greece in 1834 and was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1856. Rangavis is the author of the first History of Modern Greek Literature (1877). He also wrote numerous plays and novels, and translated Dante, Schiller, Lessing, Goethe and Shakespeare into Greek.
Andreas Laskaratos was born in Lixouri, on the Greek island of Cephalonia, in 1811, at a time when the Ionian Islands were under British rule. Brought up in a wealthy aristocratic family of land-owners, he studied law in Paris and Pisa, but only worked as a lawyer for four years. He published poetry and prose but became more well known as a satirist — his satiric caricatures and parodies are considered unique in modern Greek letters. Ηowever his intransigent morality and intense satire took their toll; in 1856 his book The Mysteries of Cephalonia was anathematized by the local Bishop and he himself was excommunicated. Following the unification of the Ionian Islands with Greece, his reputation began to grow and he eventually gained the respect and recognition of both the general public and the erudite. His excommunication was revoked in 1900, one year before he passed away in Argostoli, over ninety years old.
Antonis Samarakis was born in Athens in 1919. For decades he worked as a civil servant at the Ministry of Labour, temporarily resigning during the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936-40), and during the Second World War he was captured by Nazis and narrowly escaped a death sentence. He published his first collection of short stories, Hope Wanted, in 1954, and his collection I Refuse won the Greek State Prize for the Short Story. Samarakis has become one of the most celebrated Greek prose writers of the second half of the twentieth century, with his work translated into thirty-three languages. He was awarded the Greek Order of the Phoenix and the French Légion d’Honneur. He died in 2003.
ARISTOTLE was born in the village of Stagira in northern Greece, in 384 BCE. At seventeen he moved to Athens and was a devoted pupil of Plato for twenty years. Then, he was summoned by King Philip of Macedon to tutor his son Alexander, who later became known as Alexander the Great. Upon Aristotle ’ s return to Athens, he started his own school, the Lyceum. He lectured there for twelve years and is believed to have written most of his books during that time. In 323 BCE he retired to Chalkis, where he died one year later.
Constantine P. Cavafy was born in Alexandria in 1863 and died there on the morning of his 70th birthday in 1933. He worked as an employee in the Irrigation Service at the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria and was a leading figure in the literary life of the city. Surprisingly, he chose not to publish any collected edition of his poems during his lifetime, but preferred to circulate small privately printed collections among his friends, seemingly confident of the afterlife of his work and of his subsequent recognition. The first collection of his poems was published in 1935, and the international acclaim for his work has grown ever since.
One of Greece’s foremost singer-songwriters, Dionysis Savvopoulos (1944 –) was born in Thessaloniki. He studied law at the University of Thessaloniki but did not complete his studies. In 1967, he was imprisoned and tortured by the Greek military junta for his political views. He has released fourteen studio albums of his own compositions and a further six albums of live recordings from his concerts and shows. He has also written music for theatre and film and hosted his own TV and radio programmes. In addition, he has published five books containing his lyrics, music scores and interviews.
[Credits of Dionysis Savvopoulos’ photo: lifemagazine]
Emmanuel Roïdes (1836-1904) was born into a wealthy family on the Greek island of Syros, but spent much of his childhood and early life in Europe. In 1841, his family moved to Genoa, where he lived through the revolution of 1848. He returned to Syros in 1849 and completed his schooling there, before leaving once again to pursue his university studies in history, literature and philosophy first in Germany and later in Romania. From 1864, he lived permanently in Athens. Losing his family fortune and impoverished toward the end of his life, he found work as a librarian in the National Library. Influential as a critic, he was also a translator and short-story writer, but is best known for his one novel, Pope Joan.
Epictetus (ca 55 AD–135 AD) was a Greek-speaking Stoic philosopher. He was born a slave in the Greek city of Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey) and, after receiving his freedom, lived and taught in Rome until an imperial edict banned all philosophers from the Italian peninsula. Epictetus then established a school of philosophy in Nicopolis in northwestern Greece. His teachings were written down and published by his pupil Arrian in the eight-volume Discourses and the Manual.
Epicurus was born in 341 BCE and was a pupil of the Platonist Pamphilus of Samos, and the Democritean philosopher Nausiphanes of Teos. He began to teach when he was thirty-two, first in Mitylene on Lesbos and then in Lampsacus on the nearby mainland. In 306 BCE he moved to Athens with his loyal disciples; he purchased a property with a garden and established his school there. The Garden, as the school came to be known, soon became a popular choice among Athenian youth, alongside the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle. Epicurus died in Athens in 270 BCE, but his philosophy lives on.
George Seferiadis was born in Smyrna (now Izmir, Turkey) in 1900. Seferis is the name he adopted when he published his first book of poetry in 1931. After completing his schooling in Athens, Seferis studied Law at the Sorbonne, Paris. In 1926 he entered his country’s diplomatic service, embarking on a career that took in England, Albania, the Middle East, South Africa, and Cyprus, during some of the most turbulent years of the century. Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963 and died in Athens in 1971.
Georgios Vizyenos was born in 1849 in the small town of Vizye (Vize in Turkish), to the north-west of Constantinople (Istanbul). His whole life was a struggle with family and personal tragedy. His father died when the boy was five years old; two of his sisters perished in early childhood; and one of his brothers died in mysterious circumstances. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, he studied in Germany and became one of the leading Greek poets and short-story writers. Eventually, however, his psychological traumas took their toll, and he spent his last four years in Daphni mental asylum, where he died in 1896.
Hippocrates was born around the year 460 BC on the Greek island of Kos and legendary genealogy traces his paternal heritage directly to Asclepius and his maternal ancestry to Hercules. He was probably trained at the Asclepieion of Kos, and took lessons from the Thracian physician Herodicus of Selymbria. Throughout his life Hippocrates taught and practiced medicine, traveling as far as Thessaly, Thrace, and the Sea of Marmara. He died, most probably in Larissa, at the age of 90, though some say he lived to well over 100.
Ilias Venezis was born in Ayvali, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) in 1904. Ιn 1922, when 1.5 million Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, eighteen-year-old Venezis was taken prisoner and sent to serve as forced labour for fourteen months in central Anatolia. This experience informed much of his writing, including his novel Number 31328. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, histories, travelogues and more. His work has been translated in many languages. In 1957 he was elected to the Academy of Athens. He died in Athens in 1973.
Published by Aiora Press: Serenity
Katharine Butterworth (1931-2018) was the founder and director for 25 years of “Study in Greece”, an accredited college study program for juniors and seniors in Athens, based on contemporary Greek life, and as such the first of its kind.
The Greek poet Kostas Karyotakis (1896–1928) studied law, but took a job as a civil servant and was posted across Greece for work he found tedious and depressing, a fact reflected in the bitter, ironic tone of many of his poems. He published three books of his own poetry and, in addition, translations of poetry —notably by Heinrich Heine, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. His work embodies a turning point in Greek poetry, though his critical acclaim has been largely posthumous. Karyotakis took his own life in Preveza, a town lampooned in his very last poem.
M. Karagatsis (the pen name of Dimitris Rodopoulos) was born in Athens in 1908 and studied law in Grenoble and Athens. He is considered one of the finest Greek prose writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the Generation of the ’30s, a group of writers, poets, artists, and scholars that introduced fresh modernist currents to Greek literature and art. He was a prolific writer, with over ten published novels, as well as many novellas and plays. Besides the bold sensuality of his writing, he is known for his focus on the complexities and dark, instinctive underside of human psychology. He died in Athens in 1960.
Makis Tsitas was born in Yiannitsa in 1971. He studied Journalism in Thessaloniki and has worked in radio. He now lives in Athens, where he runs the online literary journal diastixo.gr. A prolific writer of children’s books, he has also written a collection of short stories, which was widely translated, as well as plays and song lyrics. God Is My Witness is his first novel. It was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2014 and has been published in ten languages, with several more translations forthcoming.
Margarita Liberaki (1919–2001) entered onto the literary stage at a young age. Her first novel, The Trees, appeared in 1945, when she was still in her mid-twenties, and was followed shortly after by the acclaimed Straw Hats (published in English as Three Summers). Ιn 1946 she moved to Paris, where she wrote The Other Alexander. The book was first published in 1950 in Greek, followed by English and French editions which met with immediate success. Liberaki also wrote several plays in French and Greek, and her script Phaedra was made into a movie by Jules Dassin (1962), starring Anthony Perkins and Melina Mercouri.
Nikiforos Vrettakos was born on January 1, 1912 in the village of Krokees near Sparta. In a literary career lasting some sixty years, he published over eighty-five collections of poetry, eight prose works, a long critical study of Nikos Kazantzakis and wrote innumerable articles and essays for periodicals and newspapers.
In Greece, he received more awards than any other poet of his generation, including three State Prizes for Poetry. In 1987, he was elected to the Academy of Athens in the Chair of Literature. He died in his ancestral home in Ploumitsa on August 4, 1991 while watching the sun rise over his beloved Mount Taygetus.
Nikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985) was born in Athens with family roots in Constantinople on his father’s side and in Hydra on his mother’s side. In 1914, following the outbreak of the First World War, his family moved to Constantinople where he attended a private school. He continued his education in Paris as a boarder at high school from 1919 to 1927. After returning to Athens and completing his national service, he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in 1932. With Greece’s entry into the Second World War in 1941, he was enlisted and served on the Albanian front. In 1945, he began teaching in the School of Architecture in the National Technical University of Athens, becoming a professor there in 1969. As a painter, he held many individual and group exhibitions both in Greece and abroad and represented Greece at the Biennale in Venice in 1954. He also designed the sets and costumes for numerous theatrical productions. He was twice awarded the National Prize for Poetry.
Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) has been a leading figure in the “Generation of the 1930s”, whose poets, influenced by surrealism, renewed contemporary Greek poetry. During the post-war years he lived for long periods in France, where he associated with the pioneers of the world’s avant-garde (Reverdy, Tzara, Breton, Ungaretti, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti). He published seventeen collections of poetry, translations from ancient Greek and modern European poets, and two volumes of prose. In 1979 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Plato (427–347 BCE) came from a wealthy, aristocratic Athenian family and, at twenty, became a follower of Socrates. He left Athens in 399 BCE on the death of Socrates and, following a sojourn in Megara, travelled to Egypt, Italy and Sicily. He returned to Athens in 387 BCE and founded his own school, the Academy. Lasting a millennium, it is considered the first university of the Western world. Plato ’s entire body of work has survived and has had an immense influence on modern thought.
Pythagoras, an important philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, was born on the island of Samos, probably in 585 BC. He studied with the philosopher Pherecydes in Syros and with Thales and Anaximander in Miletus, and travelled widely, including to Egypt, where he lived for more than twenty years, and Babylonia. Pythagoras eventually settled in Croton in southern Italy, where he founded his school.
His teachings have come down to us thanks to his hundreds of pupils since Pythagoras himself left no written work.
Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Cambridge, before specialising in Modern Greek studies. For thirty years until his retirement he held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, and is now Emeritus. Roderick is the author of several books of non-fiction, one novel, and several translations of fiction and poetry, all of them connected to Greece and the Greek-speaking world. He is a four-time winner of the Runciman Award, and his books have been shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and the Cundill History Prize. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), a Fellow of King’s College (FKC), and Commander of the Order of Honour of the Hellenic Republic. From 2019 to 2021 he served as a member of the Committee “GREECE 2021”, charged by the Greek government with overseeing events commemorating the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek Revolution in 1821. His latest book is The Greeks: A Global History, published in the USA and the UK in autumn 2021.
Sofia Zarabouka is an author and illustrator of children books. Born in Athens she studied painting and theatre in Greece, and graphic arts and illustration in the United States. She is particularly known for her adaptations for children of the Greek Mythology, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and ancient Greek dramas like Aristophanes’ comedies and Aeschylus’s Orestia. Sofia’s illustrations have been exhibited in many countries and feature in museum collections. She has received various awards both in Greece and abroad and in 1982 she won the highly prestigious Academy of Athens Ouranis Award.
Stelios Kouloglou is a writer, journalist and director. He is the author of several books, including novels, memoirs and political history. He was a correspondent in Paris and Moscow during the perestroika era and, from 1992 to 1995, covered the war in the former Yugoslavia. His TV show, Reportage without Frontiers, for which he was editor-in-chief and presenter, was described as ‘the symbol of investigative journalism in Greece’. In 2008 he founded tvxs.gr, Greece’s first online newspaper. He has also directed numerous documentaries, for which he has received international awards. Since 2015 he has been a Member of the European Parliament.
Stratis Doukas was born in 1895 on Moschonisi island,off the Asia Minor coast, and settled in Greece as a refugee after the Greek–Turkish war (1919–22). He served as a soldier in the Greek army in the First world war and in the ill-fated Asia Minor campaign. A Prisoner of War’s Story, published in 1929, established his reputation as an innovative writer of a new unadorned first-person narrative style. His writing encompasses lyrical prose, arts journalism and studies of important figures in the visual arts, including a nearly biography of the sculptor Υannoulis Chalepas. Doukas died in Athens in 1983.
